The industry has moved past the question of whether to adopt instant payments to how to get more value from them. At Nacha’s Remote Connect 2026, Chris Hushka, then SVP, Treasury Management Group Product Manager at Axos Bank, and Amy Faley, Manager of ACH at Veridian Credit Union, shared how instant payments have evolved within their organizations in their session, The Instant Edge: Real World Strategies for Payments Success. Their experiences offer a look at what happens after instant payments implementation—from growing transaction volumes and changing customer expectations to new use cases, operational considerations, and opportunities.
Different Paths Can Lead to Instant Payments
For Veridian Credit Union, the journey began with a specific business need. A large fintech client wanted to move money faster, while members were simultaneously questioning why moving money between accounts could take days. “One in particular was very interested in moving money faster for their customers and clients. So that really kickstarted our journey into the instant payment movement. We don’t want to lose this large client. We originate lots of ACH transactions for them and really wanted to look into this. What is this instant payment movement? What is going on?” Faley said.
“At the same time, we had many members who were reaching out to our member experience team to talk about, ‘Why does it take two days to get my money? It’s my money going from my account to my other account. Why is it taking so long?’ So really it was a great means to offer this service to keep a client and grow a client, but then to also be able to offer it to our broader membership base to move that money faster,” Faley said.
Veridian ultimately went live with Receive capabilities on the RTP® network in late 2021 and participated in the FedNow® Service pilot, enabling it to begin sending and receiving payments when the service launched.
At Axos Bank, instant payments became part of a broader effort to align its payment capabilities with its digital banking model.
“Axos is a digital-founded bank. We continue to thrive in the digital space. We pride ourselves on being a high-tech and high-touch approach—a relationship bank. So how can we tout this to the market without the ability to process and receive instant payment transactions?” Hushka said.
Axos evaluated eight technology providers before beginning implementation in 2025 and went live with Receive capabilities on both the RTP network and FedNow Service in November 2025.
Volume Can Grow Quickly After Launch
Both institutions’ experiences illustrate how dramatically instant payment activity can evolve after implementation.
For Veridian, much of that growth has come from Send transactions associated with its fintech clients. “In July of 2024, we really started to send across the networks, and we had 10 total sends totaling $40.15. In May of 2026, we had 210,953 sends totaling just under $93 million to give you an idea of how much we’ve grown in really a short period of time, just under a couple of years,” Faley said.
Axos experienced significant growth on the Receive side within months of launching. “I think on Thanksgiving Day, I recorded something like 65 transactions in total. But it was an impressive feat to show leadership as well as all of the middle management and actually just the full organization that, hey, while people were enjoying turkey and enjoying time with family, we received payments, we posted payments, everything was fine. The rails operated as intended and our systems performed as expected, and we truly maintained continuity that full week,” Hushka said.
“Fast forward just over 6 months later. I just pulled last month’s volumes. We’re just over 15,000 payments for the month. With very little marketing, we’ve grown this product, and we’re doing roughly $50 million a month in Receive volume,” Hushka said.
Real-World Use Cases Are Emerging From Customer Behavior
Looking at who is sending instant payments provides another window into how the rails are being used.
Veridian’s largest sources of received payments include Venmo, DailyPay, PayPal, Square and MoneyLion, with additional seasonal activity related to tax refunds. “Essentially P2P, payroll, and money lending. And then, of course, a spike around tax time, specifically February into March. We see quite a few tax payments coming through from Intuit and some other channels,” Faley said.
Axos is seeing similar patterns across its consumer, small business and commercial customers. “P2P payments, number one; payment processing, number two; wealth management, number three; online gaming, number four; and then number five, earned wage access. So if you look at the types of payments or use cases in payments, I think this will continue to evolve,” Hushka said.
The data can also help financial institutions identify opportunities beyond the payment transaction itself. “What I suggest to financial institutions is to look at opportunities that your members or customers are using and see if it’s something that you want to do. Could a credit union or a bank offer a microloan type product? Quite frankly, you can see the customers that are interested in it because they’re using it on a regular basis. So using business intelligence and transactional data can actually be quite helpful in identifying future opportunities,” Faley said.
Instant Payments Don’t Necessarily Replace Other Payment Types
One question surrounding instant payments has been whether their growth will come primarily at the expense of ACH and wire transactions. So far, Axos and Veridian are seeing more nuanced behavior.
“We haven’t seen too much movement away from wires. My projection, at least to my leadership, has been 5% to 10% probably long-term. We’ll see if I’m right there, but there’s not too much cannibalization of existing payments and, if so, mostly on the ACH side of the house as it relates to certain types of transfers,” Hushka said.
Faley said Veridian has observed some payments gradually migrating from ACH to instant rails. “We can see it specifically with DailyPay where we can see the ACH transactions over time becoming more instant. So what they were sending us as an ACH is now becoming instant. That’s been a cool change to see. Mostly ACH, and I think a lot of that was due to the amount per transaction. We might see a little of that grow to cannibalize wires now that the increase to $10 million is taking place. So you’re seeing more of a shifting than a full-out replacement,” Faley said.
24/7 Payments Require 24/7 Thinking
Instant payments also introduce an operational reality that financial institutions have not traditionally faced with every payment rail: transactions continue when the institution’s normal business day ends.
Axos confronted that question when integrating instant payments with its core. “One of the largest concerns probably internally, and one that many banks are probably thinking about if they haven’t yet enabled Receive through either network or both networks, our core DDA provider had a capability, a configuration that we were able to enable that would allow for memo posting during our end-of-day processing. So although our core may be mostly offline for end-of-day processing, whether it be end-of-day processing, holidays, or weekends, we have the ability to still process and memo post transactions during those off hours,” Hushka said.
He also emphasized the importance of planning for the rare transaction that does not post successfully. “I would definitely challenge you, if you’re currently live or you’re evaluating partners, to ensure that your partner has that capability to detect those failures, to alert your staff immediately so that you can take remediation action, which is to repost a payment or retry a payment,” Hushka said.
Veridian takes a different approach, straight posting transactions during nightly batch processing. “It also helps to have good internal departments who understand the core just as much, if not better, than the core provider. So we have an amazing web development team here at Veridian that does a great job of understanding the API connections and is really able to help our service providers ensure that we’re up and running 100% of the time,” Faley said.
Send Expands the Opportunity
Receive capabilities can establish the foundation for instant payments, but Send introduces a much broader range of potential use cases. Veridian has already implemented Send and continues to evaluate where instant payments can replace slower or more cumbersome processes.
“We had a very lengthy list of use cases when we started this whole journey before we even picked a provider, and we really wanted to understand what we wanted. That included use cases that we weren’t even sure were possible. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. So we just threw everything at it,” Faley said.
“Many of those use cases we’ve been able to find a means through instant payments. Understanding how to use it for loan payouts, payoffs, for closing costs, really leveraging it or getting ready to leverage it for global instant payments as that starts to come down the line. An electronic payment shift for us. It is wild how many paper checks most of us financial institutions still cut because we have to. So really, how do we get rid of that? Our members don’t like paper checks as much as we don’t like sending them,” Faley said.
Axos is preparing to add Send capabilities later on in 2026, with commercial use cases playing a significant role in its strategy. “We have a number of larger client use cases, mostly in the payment processing space as well as title and escrow, that would like to connect to us via API to process high-volume payments. That is something that is a very important channel strategy for us that we want to have available immediately upon making the service available through online banking,” Hushka said.
“In terms of use cases driving this, title and escrow, payment processing, loan funding. We do a lot of consumer, commercial loans here. We’d like those via instant payments, claim disbursements, or anything in the fiduciary services space where we could offer an option to the payees to fund them instantly via RTP or FedNow,” Hushka said.
The Value Extends Beyond Speed
The benefits both institutions described also illustrate why measuring instant payment success solely through transaction volume can miss part of the story.
At Veridian, approximately half of payments occur outside traditional business hours. “We are right about 50/50 with payments taking place during regular business hours and then outside of business hours. So this has definitely opened up some opportunities for faster payments just for our members to fund their accounts, to potentially avoid overdrafts by moving funds and by moving them quickly, by being able to make payments to their landlords or wherever that might go,” Faley said.
At Axos, one of the most important benefits has been the ability to bring deposits into newly opened accounts faster. “Everybody’s fighting for deposits now, and if we can provide this option to fund a brand-new Axos account faster, it is worth its weight in gold. Most experiences today are, ‘Hey, I’ve opened an account, and I’d like to fund that account.’ Well, it may take two to three days to first verify that account and then another two to three days to fund the account. That’s now happening within seconds, if not minutes,” Hushka said. “We’re bringing in funds faster, a speed that we never thought would be possible, and we’re seeing the impact on our deposit totals, which is tremendous, especially in the consumer bank,” Hushka said.
Instant Payments Can Expose the Next Problem To Solve
Perhaps one of the more important lessons from Axos and Veridian is that implementing instant payments can reveal where other payment experiences still create friction.
“It’s clear that many payments still have pain points, and really leveraging instant payments has exposed some of that. Our members obviously like to let us know when they think we’re doing something great, but even more so when they think that we could be doing it better,” Faley said.
That is leading Veridian to consider opportunities including global payments and reducing reliance on paper checks, while Axos is considering how instant payment infrastructure could support areas such as account verification, loan funding, and emerging forms of digital money.
For institutions still considering instant payments, the experiences of Axos and Veridian also provide two different perspectives on timing.
“I think we actually joined at the right time. We got in early for FedNow, and we’re now using what we know from being with instant payments, being on these networks, to leverage other payment opportunities, looking ahead to blockchain and stablecoin and instant global payments. I think we got in at the right time, and it’s been just a lot of knowledge, a lot of growth just from this one payment shift,” Faley said.
Hushka also shared his perspective. “I wish we would have done this earlier, especially for RTP. Given the amount of payment activity that we’re seeing and the benefits it’s bringing to our clients, I wish we would have made this leap much earlier,” Hushka said.
For Axos and Veridian, instant payments are no longer simply about moving money faster. Their experiences show how operating on real-time rails can reshape operations and provide a foundation for what financial institutions decide to build next.
